NEW CATHOLIC FEMINISM: THEOLOGY AND THEORY by Tina Beattie (London and New York: Routledge, 2006) Sample Chapter Chapter 6: Masculinity, Femininity and God

In order to develop further this exploration of Balthasar’s representation of sexual difference, we must consider the ways in which his understanding of the difference between the sexes provides an analogy by which he situates creation in relation to God. In this chapter, I argue that Balthasar’s thought is consistent with pre-modern Catholic theology, insofar as its understanding of sexual difference is primarily concerned with gendered relationships rather than with biological essentialisms. Concepts of masculinity and femininity are used to position the human and the divine in relation to one another, and only secondarily do they acquire anthropological significance with regard to human sexual relationships. However, Balthasar imports into this pre-modern theological scenario a thoroughly modern understanding of a fundamental physical and psychological difference between the sexes,1 and this biological essentialism freezes the dramatic interplay of gendered relationships, resulting in a series of exclusions and occlusions with regard to female sexual embodiment which, as we shall see in later chapters, must be sustained with considerable violence if they are to resist the persistent presence of the female body, despite the fact that it has now been written out of the script of salvation. In the first part of ‘Woman’s Answer’, Balthasar asserts the following: The Word of God appears in the world as a man [mann], as the ‘Last Adam’. This cannot be a matter of indifference. But it is astonishing on two counts. For if the Logos proceeds eternally from the eternal Father, is he not at least quasi-feminine vis-à-vis the latter? And if he is the ‘Second Adam’, surely he is incomplete until God has formed the woman from his side? We can give a provisional answer to these two questions as follows: However the One who comes forth from the Father is designated, as a human being he must be a man if his mission is to represent the Origin, the Father, in the world. And just as, according to the second account of creation, Eve is fashioned from Adam (that is, he carried her within him, potentially), so the feminine, designed to complement the man Christ, must come forth from within him, as his ‘fullness’ (Eph 1:23).2 Compacted into this short extract we discover all the theological and anthropological stereotypes which make Balthasar’s theology problematic, particularly from a feminist perspective. Balthasar’s Jesus is of necessity a biological male, because he represents God, who is ‘the Origin, the Father’. Thus there is – at least implicitly – an identification of the divine fatherhood with masculine sexuality and the male body. But Christ is also ‘quasi-feminine’ because he proceeds from the Father. Later, Balthasar observes that ‘the creature can only be secondary, responsive, “feminine” vis-à-vis God.’3 Masculinity is Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, Chapter 6:

1

the originating principle, and the feminine is the emanation of the masculine. The man is ‘incomplete’ without the feminine, which is a potential within the man and must emanate from him as his ‘fullness’, i.e. as woman. In other words, ‘man can be primary and woman secondary, where the primary remains unfulfilled without the secondary.’4 Thus sexual difference is not about two forms of human personhood – male and female – understood as co-equal but different in their capacity to image God. It is about the positioning of the human male as ‘quasi-feminine’ in relation to the transcendent masculinity of God, which represents the paternal origination of the world. The woman comes into being, not as a separate person, but as the man’s complement and completion. But why is the woman necessary to complete the man? That is a question that this chapter seeks to explore. Acting Up: Man as Material Girl5 It would seem that Balthasar’s first (and last?) human is male, so that the woman who seeks her origins and her destiny becomes a ghostly remainder, an excess that remains unaccounted for, after the man has undergone his sexual metamorphoses to consummate his union with Christ. Woman surely in this scenario suffers the fate that Irigaray describes? Woman, for her part, remains in unrealized potentiality – unrealized, at least, for/by herself. Is she, by nature, a being that exists for/by another? And in her share of substance, not only is she secondary to man but she may just as well not be as be. Ontological status makes her incomplete and uncompletable. She can never achieve the wholeness of her form. Or perhaps her form has to be seen – paradoxically – as mere privation? But this question can never be decided since woman is never resolved by/in being, but remains the simultaneous co-existence of opposites. She is both one and the other.6 But here we must negotiate another twist in theo-drama, which becomes more and more like a Restoration comedy the more deeply we delve into its scripted performances. For Balthasar and the new Catholic feminists do not eliminate woman from creation: they eliminate man, and that is where the real issue lies. Balthasar’s woman is ‘by nature, a being that exists for/by another’, who ‘may just as well not be as be’, because, while ‘woman’ has a role to play in this drama, her body is quite redundant to the performance, which is really ‘his’. Thus we must turn this argument on its head, in order to see that Balthasar’s theology does indeed posit a thoroughly sexed creation: a feminine creation, with the only masculine presence being the priest who represents the divinity of Christ, and therefore of God the Father as the (masculine) origin and source of life. Except that Balthasar forgets himself, and scripts the male subject into his theology at every turn. Ostensibly, Balthasar’s woman is secondary to man, as we have seen. But who in fact is ‘incomplete and uncompletable’ in Balthasar’s scenario? Who is ‘both one and the other’, ‘mere privation’? How can the first human be male, if all human creatures are woman in relation to God? Surely, it is Adam who comes to consciousness in Eden as a being that exists for/by another, incomplete and uncompletable, lacking wholeness? Adam, in Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, Chapter 6:

2

Balthasar’s logic, would in fact be ‘woman’ who does not know who ‘he’ is until ‘she’ appears. Only with Eve can he become who he is not – woman, bride, feminine other to the masculine God. Thus the male cannot have priority in creation, for there are no men in creation. Masculinity, according to this account, would make a brief epiphany in the incarnation – a flickering presence, almost effaced in the ‘quasi-feminine’ Jesus, and entirely poured out on the cross when, once again, the woman appears as ‘his’ fullness, ‘his’ body. A devouring woman perhaps, constantly threatening his divine transcendence, swallowing him whole as he struggles to deny his vulnerability, his bodiliness, as he strains towards that pole which is masculine, spirit, individual, and she lures him back to where he belongs, the only space available to him in creation – feminine, body, community. A consummate bliss to die for, perhaps? How can we conceive of such symbolic transformations? It is worth returning here to Balthasar’s idea of the tensions that position the human subject in the world – the polarities of spirit/body, individual/community, and male/female. Ostensibly, these are three forms of difference in the midst of which every human being must find his or her way of living, but are they not all reducible simply to the man and his other, variously identified as woman, community, body? Balthasar’s ‘woman’ is the body of Christ, while ‘man’ is the headship and divinity of Christ. ‘She’ is the community of the Church, while ‘he’ is the representative of the one and only true man, Jesus Christ. ‘She’ is the woman, identified with humanity, creation, derivation. ‘He’ is the man, identified with God, creator, origination. But he is not God, and in order to become other than God, in order to establish the diastasis that marks the separation between ‘man’ and God and to experience the desire that draws ‘man’ to God, he must become what he is not – he must become ‘her’. She is his fulfilment and completion because only she allows him to know who he is in relation to God, i.e. he is not-God, and because she is not-man, and God is masculine, he must become ‘she’ in order to remind himself that he is not-God. This dilemma of the male subject straining towards divinity while never being able to escape the ‘femininity’ of his body, his desires and his dependencies is not new. Tracing the emergence of concepts of divinity and sexual difference in the early Church, Virginia Burrus writes: If the horizon of human becoming is named in the terms of Father, Son, and Spirit, this does not in itself make of God a male idol – but it does, as a matter of fact, construct both an idealized masculinity and a masculinized transcendence. For the Fathers, femaleness is allied with the stubborn particularity of created matter, against which the unlimited realm of supposedly ungendered divinity may be defined by theologians who have risen above their gender as well.7 In Balthasar’s God and in Balthasar’s ‘man’, we are indeed confronted by a masculinized transcendence and by a theologian who appears to have risen above his gender, insofar as ‘he’ is not sexed until ‘she’ enters the scene of the text. But of the three fourth century Fathers analysed by Burrus in her study – Athanasius of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa

Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, Chapter 6:

3

and Ambrose of Milan – it is Gregory whose theology most closely resembles that of Balthasar.8 Burrus introduces her chapter on Gregory of Nyssa with a quotation from Hélène Cixous which I repeat here, because it is also highly pertinent to a discussion of Balthasar: Is Tancredi a woman ending, or a man beginning to be a woman in order to be a man? But my God, I am only me, I am only a woman, how can I express what is more than me? I divine what is more than a woman, what is more than a man, but above me everything sparkles and dazzles me and merges into a single person with athletic aspirations, rather tall for a woman, yes, she seems to me to be a woman but set naturally in the bearing of a man, like my pearl in turquoise.9 Quoting Cixous again, Burrus writes that Gregory’s masculinity is clearly a complicated affair. A ‘character all the more man in that he is more woman,’ Gregory assumes a role that might, in a staging of his life, be most convincingly played by an actress, like the knight Tancredi of Rossini’s opera.10 She continues, However much in awe of his sister Gregory may wish to seem to be, it is not women who are privileged as receptive lovers of Christ within the highly charged, sublimated homoeroticism of his soteriology, which catapults ‘man’ into the infinite pursuit of the transcendent Man, of transcendence, of Manhood itself. … Is Gregory ‘a woman ending, or a man beginning to be a woman in order to be a man?’ It is difficult to place this writer, and difficult also to place myself, as ‘woman,’ in relation to …. ‘him’? Squinting hard against the dazzle of the performance, I look at a man and see someone alluringly like me, only taller. Coming closer, I perceive that the woman is ‘set naturally in the bearing of a man.’ Absorbed by this capacious masculinity, I sense my own ‘ending,’ lurching abruptly into a ‘beginning,’ the beginning for a man, for the man I am becoming – having been absorbed. If (as Nicole Loraux notes) in such dizzying transactions ‘the man gains in complexity, while the woman loses substance,’ she is (I am) little more than a ghostly remainder, a spirit or an angel. Yet she also leaves her traces in his texts (not least as ‘spirit’ or ‘angel’), footprints into which I may yet insinuate my soles.11 Burrus suggests something of the dizzying consequences of trying to read not just Gregory but also Balthasar as woman, where one’s identity becomes caught up in the flux of the man’s quest for meaning – for the transcendent Man/God – and the woman becomes ever more elusive and hard to locate. It is tempting to draw a number of parallels between Gregory and Balthasar, not just in the sexual instabilities that haunt their theology, but in their relationships to the women who leave their traces in these men’s texts, so that one is not sure whether it is ‘she’ or ‘he’ who is speaking. Gregory’s Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, Chapter 6:

4

work on resurrection was inspired by the deathbed reflections of his sister, Macrina, whom he referred to as his teacher and revered for her philosophical and spiritual wisdom and for her life of faith.12 Much of Balthasar’s theology was inspired by the spiritual outpourings of Adrienne von Speyr, whom he met in 1940 and with whom he worked closely until her death in 1964, living in the home she shared with her husband, Werner Kaegi, for fifteen years. After her death, Balthasar wrote, On the whole I received far more from her, theologically, than she from me, though, of course, the exact proportion can never be calculated. … Today, after her death, her work appears far more important to me than mine, and the publication of her still-unpublished writings takes precedence over all personal work of my own.13 As we shall see later, the relationship with von Speyr may be a significant factor in explaining the violent sexual energy that drives Balthasar’s theological rhetoric. Sexual Difference in Eastern and Western Christianity Despite their apparent similarities, there are significant differences between Gregory and Balthasar, and here I want to open up a plurivocal conversation on the topic of gender and sexual difference in the Christian tradition, in order to ask what new potential might be revealed if we begin to explore the different ways in which tradition might be interpreted in response to contemporary questions about sexuality. Gregory’s Platonic theology employs a wide range of gendered metaphors and allegories to describe human and divine relationships. As we saw earlier (see chapter 5), in his Commentary on the Song of Songs he represents the relationship between the soul and God and between Christ and the Church in nuptial imagery. But whereas Balthasar and the new feminists sometimes conflate the language of woman, femininity and bride so that they use them interchangeably, suggesting that the three are ontologically related (as are man, masculinity and bridegroom), Gregory’s ‘bride’ is not woman, nor is she ‘feminine’ in the ways in which Balthasar uses that word. For Gregory, sexual difference has no ontological significance, and therefore his use of nuptial symbolism needs to be interpreted as a form of mystical language that transcends the body’s sexual particularity. In his seventh homily on the Song of Songs, we read: No one can adequately grasp the terms pertaining to God. For example, ‘mother’ is mentioned (in the Song) in place of ‘father.’ Both terms mean the same, because there is neither male nor female in God (for how can anything transitory like that be attributed to God? But when we are one in Christ, we are divested of the signs of this difference along with the old man). Therefore, every name equally indicates God’s ineffable nature; neither can ‘male’ nor ‘female’ defile God’s pure nature. … Neither does it make much difference whether one calls the Son of God the only begotten God, or the Son of his love. According to Paul, each name has the capacity to be a bridal escort which leads the bridegroom to dwell in us.14 Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, Chapter 6:

5

The difference between Gregory and Balthasar is as much ideological as theological. Gregory may have been influenced by prevailing cultural stereotypes about men and women,15 but his theology is not captive to a sexual ideology as Balthasar’s is, and this allows him considerably more linguistic freedom in terms of analogy and symbolism,16 because his gendered analogies do not constantly come crashing up against his sexual ontologies, with all the ensuing violence that results in Balthasar’s theology. As a result, the gendering of Gregory’s theology does not become a form of ontotheology in which sexual relationships are projected into the being of God. Rather, as with later women mystics such as Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Avila, his understanding of the soul as bride needs to be understood in the context of ‘a profound apophatic sensibility about the divine “essence”‘,17 by way of which the nuptial union goes beyond any difference that can be named or conceptualized, so that it opens into contemplation on the imponderable mystery of God. To discover one’s ending in one’s beginning with Gregory is to go before and beyond sexual difference, to a creation and an eschaton in which humankind is sexless, and therefore ‘woman’ is arguably no more and no less significant than ‘man’. Gregory reads the creation stories in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 in terms of a double creation.18 The first account of the human made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27) refers to a non-material creation, in which the human is a form of pre-sexual, angelic being. Sexual embodiment is a feature of a secondary, material creation in which God’s foreknowledge of the fall makes sexuality contingent upon the coming of death into creation, but it is associated with animality and does not refer to the image of God in the human. At the resurrection this animal dimension will be stripped away so that we shall be restored to our original, pre-sexual condition in the image of God. This brings us to a point of significant difference between eastern and western Christianity. The Orthodox church has been influenced by the encratite theology of early Christian thinkers such as Origen, Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, in which the virginal body most perfectly symbolizes the redeemed, asexual human being.19 The continuing influence of this tradition means that sexuality does not have ontological significance in Orthodox Christianity.20 However, Roman Catholicism has followed a different route in its doctrine of creation, by adopting Augustine’s understanding of a single creative act in which the will of God finds material expression in creation, so that everything that exists – including the sexual human body – is part of the originary and ultimate intention of God.21 This means that, from an Augustinian perspective, sexual difference is to some extent ontological, even although the image of God is associated, not with the sexually differentiated body but with the rational mind, which ostensibly transcends sexual difference in being common to both men and women. Augustine is insistent that the female body is redeemed no less than the male body. Rejecting the encratite tradition, he refers to the verse from Matthew: ‘For in the resurrection they will neither be married nor take wives, but they are like angels in heaven’. (Matt 22:30). But, to quote Børresen, ‘Augustine stresses that in the resurrection

Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, Chapter 6:

6

there shall be no marriage, but the Lord did not say that there would be no women: “Nuptias ergo Dominus futures esse negauit in resurrectione, non feminas”.’22 As we are created in the beginning, so we shall be in the end – before and beyond sexual embodiment according to Gregory, created and redeemed as sexual bodies, according to Augustine. Augustine defends the resurrection of the female body in the following terms: a woman’s sex is not a defect; it is natural. And in the resurrection it will be free of the necessity of intercourse and childbirth. However, the female organs will not subserve their former use; they will be part of a new beauty, which will not excite the lust of the beholder – there will be no lust in that life – but will arouse the praises of God for his wisdom and compassion, in that he not only created out of nothing but freed from corruption that which he had created.23 This might be read as a theology of affirmation as far as female sexuality is concerned, although, as Børresen points out, ‘Augustine’s viewpoint is here decidedly androcentric, since he argues that the recreated beauty of female bodies will no longer divert resurrected human males, henceforth liberated from their sinful concupiscence.’24 Nevertheless, insofar as this suggests the liberation of the female body from the sexualized male gaze, and asserts the value and beauty of female embodiment in its own right, as made for God and not for man, it is a significant text for feminist theology. However, Augustine’s vision of eschatological equality is tempered by his acceptance and justification of a created order in which woman and man are orientated towards one another in a hierarchical relationship that reflects the psychological relationship between the will and the passions. Just as the healthy mind is one in which (masculine) contemplative wisdom prevails over (feminine) everyday knowledge and emotion, so the healthy society is one in which men have authority over women. This is also bound up with Augustine’s idea of the image of God being primarily reflected in the man and only secondarily in the woman. For example, he writes, the woman together with her husband is the image of God, so that the whole substance is one image. But when she is assigned as a help-mate, a function that pertains to her alone, then she is not the image of God; but as far as the man is concerned, he is by himself alone the image of God, just as fully and completely as when he and the woman are joined together into one.25 So, although Augustine’s affirmation of female bodily redemption is a potential resource for feminist theology, his hierarchical gendering of social and spiritual relationships reflects a deeply rooted androcentrism that to this day pervades the theology of Balthasar and the new feminists. Ruether’s influential 1974 essay, ‘Misogynism and Virginal Feminism in the Fathers of the Church’, offers a critical evaluation of the relative merits of Augustine and Gregory for feminist theology. She points to the difficulty that early Christian thinkers had in interpreting Genesis 1:27: ‘God created man in His own image; in the image of God he Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, Chapter 6:

7

created him; male and female He created them.’ In an attempt to reconcile the transcendent, noncorporeality of God with the bisexuality implied in the second part of the verse, two different interpretations evolved, both of which privileged an androcentric perspective: For Greek thought it was axiomatic that spiritual reality was unitary. … Duality appears only with matter. So God cannot be dual, nor can man’s spiritual image be bisexual. … The guiding view of the Fathers was not an androgyny that preserved bisexuality on a psychic level, but rather that monism which, alone, is appropriate to spirit. This could be stated by identifying maleness with monism, making femaleness secondary, or else by a nonsexual monism, but not by a true androgyny. Gregory Nyssa chose the latter course, and Augustine the former.26 Ruether traces the ways in which a profound hostility towards the body and sexuality developed in patristic theology, primarily associated with the female flesh. Although Gregory was more positive than Augustine about the compatibility of marriage with the spiritual life (he was probably married), there was nevertheless a widespread belief that the contemplative life was best served by virginal asceticism, and that the female body posed a particular threat to male asceticism. For Gregory, the sexual, animal accretions that come to be associated with humankind in the second stage of creation are weighted towards female bodily functions of procreation: ‘The dermatinoi chitones are expressed as “intercourse, conception, childbirth, defilement, lactation, feeding, elimination of bodily waste, gradual growth, youth, old age, illness and death.”‘27 Ruether quotes Augustine’s advice regarding the love of women: A good Christian is found in one and the same woman to love the creature of God whom he desires to be transformed and renewed, but to hate in her the corruptible and mortal conjugal connection, sexual intercourse and all that pertains to her as a wife.28 It can therefore be seen that, while these two main trajectories of the Christian tradition offer different interpretations of the significance of the sexual body, both are deeply negative in their attitudes towards sexual embodiment, particularly female sexual embodiment, and neither invites a straightforward appropriation for the construction of a feminist theology. As Coakley suggests, if in the East we have detected at least a tendency to announce a spurious (and desexed) equality for female creatureliness, in the West a more explicit stereotype of subordinate female bodiliness has been the norm. From a Christian feminist standpoint clearly neither of these solutions is agreeable as a systematic view of female creatureliness.29 We shall return to these ideas, but let me now consider another reading of Augustine, which can also be constructively applied to Balthasar. Sexual Difference and the Imago Dei Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, Chapter 6:

8

Penelope Deutscher points to the ambiguity in Augustine’s thought, which on the one hand equates women and the body with distance from God, and on the other hand affirms that ‘women as rational creatures are equally made in God’s image.’30 Deutscher argues that it is only by understanding the complex, inter-dependent relationships among the different terms – man, masculinity, woman, femininity – that it becomes possible to see how these concepts function as ‘operative contradictions’ in Augustine’s texts, in terms of the relationship between man, woman and God. In particular, insofar as rationality is associated with the image of God, it is masculine. But man in this sense is not masculine, because he is bodily and material, while woman, insofar as she is rational, also has access to the masculine. Thus, while masculinity is always associated with reason and God, and femininity with the body and irrationality, it is the play of difference between masculinity and femininity, man and woman, that allows Augustine to express the differences between man, woman and God in multiple ways beyond binary gender dualisms: Augustine establishes a hierarchy according to which woman is secondary to and subject to man’s will, while both are subject to God’s will. As souls, man and woman are equal in the eyes of God. But as bodies, man is made in the image of God in a sense in which woman is not. … While Augustine emphasises women’s equality to man, he considers the spirituality of both to involve a transcendence of the feminine principle, the flesh. In the case of men, ‘godliness’ amounts to a series of symbolic connotations of keeping one’s distance from women, who represent lust, and loss of will over the body. But for women, this signifies the more problematic understanding that women must transcend the flesh they themselves symbolically represent. Godliness would involve women keeping distance from ‘themselves’. In the most extreme form of this position, the godliness of women involves them in a ‘becoming male’.31 Deutscher goes on to explain how this gendering of relationships works in terms of helping the man to situate himself in relation to God. She points out that, ‘Since Augustine associates women with nature and materiality, we may say that the material excess, by which man is constantly exceeding the masculine point which identifies him, is feminised.’32 But it is not enough simply to say that man is like God in his masculine spirit and not like God in his feminine flesh, because that would collapse the essential difference between man and an implicitly masculine God: In effect, this means that the point of pure masculinity, which defines man and by which the feminine as ‘not-man’ is devalued, must be positioned as a point inaccessible to man. Despite the fact that God has been defined as ‘not-man’, man is only truly masculine insofar as he approximates God. So for all that God is ‘not-man’, paradoxically it is God who is positioned as the ideal point with which man is identified. So the recession, while rendering an illusion of masculine identity as mind, or reason, does so by moving towards a point never arrived at. All that is progressively isolated from man and devalued as ‘not-man’ is displaced on to the feminine. Man is defined by a term he nevertheless is not, and is never at one with, defined by a term which is but a shifting recession to a point it never Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, Chapter 6:

9

coincides with. So the feminine, being the extent to which man falls short of God, is thereby a term flexible enough to include all that we typically define as masculine: reason, mind, man.33 Just as with Balthasar, Deutscher shows how Augustine’s man vanishes from creation, into the infinite distance between man and God. Insofar as he is not God, neither is he masculine, therefore he becomes thoroughly feminized, even in his masculine aspects. The complex deconstructive strategies employed by Burrus and Deutscher in their readings of Gregory and Augustine respectively go beyond the more straightforward analyses of feminist critics such as Ruether and Børresen. Taken together, however, these diverse feminist voices pose significant questions to the classical theologies of east and west. Børresen argues that neither Augustine nor Gregory provides a viable resource for feminist theology. As far as Gregory is concerned, Gregory’s theology can be labelled ‘feminist’ in the sense of defining maleness and femaleness as equally alien to divinity, and thereby correcting andromorphic God-language. Nevertheless, Gregory’s correlated anthropology is particularly inapplicable from a modern feminist standpoint, since his definition of perfect humanity excludes both male and female gender. In fact, Gregory’s double Adam and Eve are not properly human beings, but hybrid creatures, with angel-like, spiritual image quality and beast-like, sexually differentiated corporality.34 Augustine has a more ‘holistic concept of humanity’ than Gregory, but in defending the ‘protological unity’ between Adam and Eve/Christ and Mary through their mutual participation in the fall and the incarnation, his ‘doctrinal sexology’ collapses without a divinely ordained gender hierarchy to hold it in place: It is essential to note that Christocentric typology, even in Augustine’s ‘feminist’ version, presupposes God-like Adam served by non-God-like Eve. Christ as new Adam is incarnated in perfect manhood, whereas the new Eve, Mary/church, reenacts the first woman’s ancillary role. A nuptial symbolism which transposes creational androcentrism to the order of redemption, appears particularly anachronistic in post-patriarchal culture.35 She goes on to argue that genderfree God-likeness as introduced by Clement of Alexandria and enforced through Augustine, is in modern theological anthropology dismissed by a combined and inclusive holistic definition of imago Dei, where both women and men are fully God-like in their male or female humanity. It follows that asexual God-likeness in andromorphic disguise is now superseded.36 Ruether also argues for the full recognition of the imago Dei in both women and men, as a corrective to the ‘patriarchal anthropology’37 of the Christian tradition. She advocates

Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, Chapter 6: 10

the affirmation of ‘a full and equivalent human nature and personhood, as male and female’,38 based on the awareness that The fullness of redeemed humanity, as image of God, is something only partially disclosed under the conditions of history. We seek it as a future self and world, still not fully achieved, still not fully revealed. But we also discover it as our true self and world, the foundation and ground of our being. When we experience glimpses of it, we recognize not an alien self but our own authentic self.39 Nevertheless, the affirmation of the imago Dei in both sexes as offered by Børresen and Ruether needs to be opened up to an analogical interpretation that is more attentive to the mystery of God in the human and the human in God, by asserting that, not only are man and woman equally made in the image of God, but that, as Mary McClintock Fulkerson argues, neither is capable of imaging God. Fulkerson summarizes feminist arguments for the inclusion of women in the imago Dei as being based on the awareness that Christianity has focused on the maleness of Jesus ‘to characterize authentic human being and to limit the implicit universal reach of imago Dei.’40 The solution proposed by Ruether and others is to liberate women by recognizing that As a naming of subjects of God’s saving care, the imago Dei entails no essential definition of the subject, characterized only by finitude and God-dependence. … The doctrine’s basic work is to say that being female is ‘like God,’ too, even as it is God-dependent, and in so doing produce new insights about creation. As such, feminist theologians employ a traditional frame to focus on a particular subject, woman, and enhance the potential reach of that frame by inserting woman in the category of finitely good human subjects, exposing the problematic character of the male-identified constructions of imago Dei.41 But Fulkerson argues that this inclusive approach to subjectivity, which entails an everwidening use of the term ‘woman’ to include those currently excluded, fails to recognize that an identity is a function of a position within a system of differences. Subject identity does not depend on substance or natural essence, just as it does not depend on the sameness of the body. Rather it depends on the outside on which it rests.42 In Saussurean terms, language derives its meaning not from a referential relationship between signifier and signified, but from the synchronic structuring of relationships between words that constitute systems of meaning. Poststructuralism entails the recognition that ‘these relations do not occur simply in structures that function as closed or self-contained producers of meaning. Rather they intersect with and unravel into endless processes of differentiation’.43 Words derive their meanings from what is not said

Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, Chapter 6: 11

– from the excluded others that define them. So the word ‘man’ has significance only in relation to ‘woman’ – because to know what man is, one must know what he is not. This problem of the excluded other is not overcome simply by adding more and more terms to a concept, because this will proliferate as many exclusions as it will meanings, since every meaning entails an outsider, a silenced negation of its other. Appealing to Butler, Fulkerson points out that the assumption that a view is a perspective and that what is excluded might be added, is to suggest that the categorical system man/woman of the heterosexual regime can accommodate the bodies and desires that fall outside. However, the Other, in these terms of difference, would be defined in the categories of the dominant regime, and virtually obliterated.44 Thus, to seek to include women as well as men in the imago Dei entails affirmation that the world is divided into two kinds of people, and what we want is respect for both kinds. But this implies that gender criticism is a kind of ‘me, too’ theory. Taking Butler’s view, what is going on here is the deployment of the heterosexual binary. The continual affirming of man means that, minimally, what lurks behind the sign ‘woman’ in Ruether’s formulation are certain constructions of heterosexual, male-desiring subjects who know their deep identities to be sexually female. For that is all that can be accommodated by the system of discourse that Ruether leaves in place.45 Within this system, Fulkerson argues that there will continue to be ‘occlusions [which] support this binary, and we might fairly assume they are racial, too.’46 Fulkerson’s commitment to poststructuralism is allied to a strong narrative perspective that allows her to go beyond linguistic analysis, to seek concrete strategies for the liberation of women. She argues that the Christian story of a God of justice provides a context in which all human discourse is relativized and called to account. The task of feminist theology is to retain a narrative dimension, by developing ‘stories of a God of justice in light of poststructuralist destabilizations.’47 This means that the feminist telling of God’s story will be one that constantly draws attention to that which is outside its own discursive boundaries, so that its instability arises not from internal contradictions and multiplicities, but from an awareness of its own fragile and dependent positioning before the mystery of God’s promise of redemption: A good feminist theological story will be an incomplete story of a God-loved creation, a creation for which the only requisite features of imaging God are finitude and dependence. That story must allow for the commitment to the particular situation to develop new sensibilities for the outside, defined as violations of the goodness of the finite, God-dependent creation. It must sponsor the capacity for total self-criticism, for commitment to the goodness of the partial, and for the possibility that all is redeemable. For the outside, as a place where the Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, Chapter 6: 12

occlusions of a situation appear, is not a stable foundation. A theological story might name it as the lure of an eschatological future, but, by definition, it will require disruption of the present system. Therefore it will not look like God’s eschatological future to many.48 To situate feminist theology in the context of the Christian story means, for Fulkerson, that God’s justice is a limiting factor, allowing for the possibility of radical challenge and transformation, calling into question all human claims to knowledge and truth. Understood in this way, an awareness of the justice and unknowability of God might serve as a brake to the violence that feeds unequal and unjust power relations. Fulkerson exposes the foundationalism inherent in critiques such as those offered by Børresen and Ruether in their readings of patristic theology. In seeking to go beyond both Augustine and Gregory, they appeal to the concept of ‘woman’ as a stable foundation for knowledge, from which it is possible to recognize exclusions and to construct a more inclusive and therefore just understanding of the imago Dei. But this fails to recognize the extent to which this heterosexual gendering of theological language simply shifts the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, because in order to say that both man and woman image God, we have to say what does not image God, or the term becomes meaningless. As Fulkerson suggests, it is the destabilization of the whole concept of a two-sex anthropology, in the context of a Christian narrative of creaturely dependence and finitude in relation to God, that offers the hope of an ongoing process of disruption and transformation of systems of oppression. Sexuality and Sacramentality However, here the plot thickens and the story becomes more complex, because we must bring into view the excluded other of Fulkerson’s feminist story. Nancy Dallavalle writes: McClintock Fulkerson makes important arguments for restraint with regard to theological assertions about the subject ‘woman’ and the more complex ‘women’s experience,’ but surely these are shaped by her own Reformed tradition’s position of ‘iconoclasm’ with regard to creation, now appropriated in a new way for McClintock Fulkerson’s feminist insights. Such an ‘iconoclasm’ is foreign (not ‘heresy’) to both the Catholic tradition of finding biological sexuality to be theologically significant and the Catholic sacramental sensibility.49 In her quest for a liberating God of justice as part of the Christian story, Fulkerson does indeed offer a minimalist account from a Catholic sacramental perspective. While justice is essential to any human understanding of God and of personal and social relationships, God is not reducible to justice alone, for everything that we are is caught up in the divine life, so that our story about God has to include those aspects of ourselves that are more to do with desire, beauty, creativity and sensuality than with justice per se. The real challenge for Catholic feminist theology is to hold in tension the sacramental significance of gender in Catholic worship and devotion as expressions of human abundance before Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, Chapter 6: 13

the abundance of God, with the need to remain attentive to ways in which this gendered language has the capacity either to affirm or to subvert social and sexual hierarchies with all the injustices and various forms of denigration and oppression that these can create for women. Although Fulkerson is critical of the foundationalist approach that she associates with feminist theology, her own Christian story positions her in such a way that she does not have easy access to the kind of gendered discourse that prevails in some forms of premodern Catholicism, particularly in patristic theology and mysticism, and that allows us to talk of God in a cataphatic outpouring of love and abandonment. We have seen how both Burrus and Deutscher suggest ways in which a deconstructive reading of patristic texts opens into a polymorphous and constantly shifting use of gendered imagery, capable of challenging the dualisms and essentialisms of later theological models. Indeed, Burrus makes extravagant claims for the potential of patristic theology: what is disavowed, suppressed, or dismissed as excessive in Christian discourse – seemingly so much ‘nothing’ – provides excellent material with which to create. … The audacious act of situating desire and generativity in the realm of absolute divinity results in no mean inheritance; for a humanity said to be created in the image of God, ancient theology is a gift that keeps on giving.50 What was thoroughly disavowed by Protestantism was the sacramental, gendered imagery associated with Catholicism, including its sacramental priesthood, its potent devotion to the Virgin Mother of God, its organic, maternal ecclesiology, and its lavish devotional language of spiritual fecundity and desire. Protestant man and his Enlightenment successor were male through and through, with no explicit need of a feminine other to express their (homo)erotic desire for Christ. In a form of Christianity focused resolutely on the Word of God with every trace of divine presence and activity purged from the created world, in which taste, touch, smell and sight yielded to the sense of hearing alone, the sexual body became a site of moral rather than sacramental significance, ordered towards marriage but not orientated towards God in its abundant and unruly desire. Perhaps, in such a world, God is already sufficiently distant, sufficiently intangible, to remove the man’s constant fear of being inappropriately seduced by his Man God through the constant stimulation of his senses by the revelation of God in the material world. From such a distance, one does not need to dress up in bridal veils and practise symbolic castration in order for human eros to reach out to God in sensuous passion. God chastises and sanctifies the Protestant soul, but on the whole ‘he’ does not seduce it.51 The challenge for Catholic sacramentality is to retain its sense of the revelatory significance of gender and sexuality, while acknowledging the equality in difference of the sexes as beings before God, whose difference is not constituted by stable polarities of masculinity and femininity but by the dynamics of difference and desire which suggest to us something of the nature of our relationship to God.

Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, Chapter 6: 14

One obvious solution would be the ordination of women, which would recognize the significance of both male and female bodies for the presencing of God in creation and worship, in the service of a dynamic sacramental analogy that would move restlessly, creatively, between the affirmation that God is both male and female and that God is neither male nor female. Irigaray’s ‘sensible transcendental’ might then become a resource for a sacramental theology which acknowledges our experience of the divine in the bodily realities of human sexuality, desire and fecundity, while also recognizing that God is the infinitely Other, Being who transcends every possible way of being in the world while never abandoning the world or being separable from it. But in the next chapter, we shall see just how tortuous the arguments become, when the new Catholic feminists try to affirm the sacramental significance of the female body, while defending the exclusion of women from the sacramental priesthood on the basis of a nuptial ecclesiology that owes a great deal to Balthasar’s influence.

Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, Chapter 6: 15

Notes: 1

For a study of the ways in which pre-modern gender roles, understood primarily in terms of their social functions, came to be interpreted through an appeal to scientific theories of a fundamental biological difference between the sexes, see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1992. 2 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-drama III: The Dramatis Personae: the Person in Christ, trans. Graham Harrison, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992, pp. 283-4. 3 Ibid, p. 287. 4 Ibid, p. 284. 5 With apologies to Madonna. 6 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 165. 7 Virginia Burrus, ‘Begotten, Not Made’: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 185. 8 Interestingly, in Balthasar’s study of Gregory he makes little of the pervasive sexual imagery and eroticism to be found in Gregory’s mystical theology. Perhaps this is because the book on Gregory was published in 1942, at the beginning of Balthasar’s relationship with Adrienne von Speyr and before her influence became apparent. But that is to anticipate. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa, trans. Mark Sebanc, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995. 9 Burrus, ‘Begotten, Not Made’, p. 80, quoting Hélène Cixous, ‘Tancredi Continues’, in ‘Coming to Writing’ and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson, Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 1991. 10 Burrus, ‘Begotten, Not Made’, p. 83, quoting Hélène Cixous, ‘The Author in Truth’, in ‘Coming to Writing’ and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson, Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. 147-8. 11 Burrus, ‘Begotten, Not Made’, p. 84, quoting Nicole Loraux, The Experiences of Tiersias: The Feminine and the Greek Man, trans. Paula Wissing, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 14-15. 12 See Gregory of Nyssa, ‘The Life of Saint Macrina’, and ‘On the Soul and the Resurrection’ in Saint Gregory of Nyssa: Ascetical Works, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, Washington DC, The Catholic University of America Press, 1967. 13 Hans Urs von Balthasar, First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr, trans. Antje Lawry and Sr. Sergia Englund Lawry, O.C.D., San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1981 [1968], p. 13. 14 Gregory of Nyssa, Commentary on the Song of Songs, trans. Casimir OCSO with introduction McCambley, Brookline Mass.: Hellenic College Press, 1987, pp. 145-6. 15 Cf Kari Elisabeth Børresen, ‘God’s Image, Man’s Image? Patristic Interpretation of Gen. 1,27 and I Cor. 11,7’, in Image of God and Gender Models in Judaeo-Christian Tradition, Kari Elisabeth Børresen, ed., Oslo, Solum Forlag, 1991, p. 198. 16 Cf the brief but illuminating discussion re Gregory’s Trinitarian language in Sarah Coakley, ‘“Persons” in the “Social” Doctrine of the Trinity: Current Analytic Discussion and “Cappadocian” Theology’, in Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender, ed. Sarah Coakley, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 2002 17 Ibid, p. 124. 18 In this brief survey I sketch only the main contours of Gregory’s theology. For further reading, see the essays in Sarah Coakley, (ed.), Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa, Oxford, Blackwell, 2003. See also Giulia Sfameni Gasparro, ‘Image of God and Sexual Differentiation in the Tradition of Enkrateia’, in Image of God and Gender Models in Judaeo-Christian Tradition, ed. Kari Elisabeth Børresen, Oslo, Solum Forlag, 1991; Børresen, ‘God’s Image, Man’s Image?’ ; Rosemary Radford Ruether, ‘Misogynism and Virginal Feminism in the Fathers of the Church’, in Religion and Sexism - Images of Women in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1974. 19 For an analysis of this encratite tradition in early Christian writings, see Gasparro, ‘Image of God and Sexual Differentiation’. See also Andrew Louth, ‘The Body in Western Catholic Christianity’, in Religion and the Body, ed. Sarah Coakley, Cambridge, New York and Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 1997. 20 See Sarah Coakley, ‘Creaturehood Before God: Male and Female’, in Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 2002.

Beattie Chapter 6: 16

21

See Børresen, ‘God’s Image, Man’s Image?’ pp. 199-205, Louth, ‘The Body in Western Catholic Christianity’. See also Tina Beattie, God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate: A Marian Narrative of Women’s Salvation, London and New York: Continuum, 2002, pp. 55-56. 22 Børresen, ‘God’s Image, Man’s Image?’ p. 204, quoting Augustine, De civitate Dei 22,17. CCSL 48,835836. See Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. edited by David Knowles Henry Bettenson, London: Penguin Books, 1981 1467], p. 1058. 23 Augustine, City of God, p. 1057, Book 22, Ch. 17. 24 Børresen, ‘God’s Image, Man’s Image?’ p. 203. 25 Augustine, The Trinity, trans. C.S.S.R. Stephen McKenna, vol. 45, The Fathers of the Church, a new translation, Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1963, Book 12, Ch. 7, n. 10. 26 Ruether, ‘Misogynism and Virginal Feminism’, pp. 153-4. 27 Gasparro, ‘Image of God and Sexual Differentiation’, p. 156, quoting Gregory of Nyssa, PG 46, 148 C149 A. 28 Augustine, De Sermone Dom. in Monte, 41, quoted in Ruether, ‘Misogynism and Virginal Feminism’, p. 161. 29 Coakley, ‘Creaturehood Before God’, p. 65. 30 Penelope Deutscher, ‘Operative Contradiction in Augustine’s Confessions’, in Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction and the History of Philosophy, London and New York, Routledge, 1997, p. 144. 31 Ibid, p. 145. 32 Ibid, p. 161. 33 Ibid. 34 Børresen, ‘God’s Image, Man’s Image?’ p. 199. 35 Ibid, p. 205. 36 Ibid, 37 Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Towards a Feminist Theology, London: SCM Press, 1992, p. 94. 38 Ibid, p. 111. 39 Ibid. 40 Mary McClintock Fulkerson, ‘Contesting the Gendered Subject: A Feminist Account of the Imago Dei’, in Horizons in Feminist Theology: Identity, Tradition, and Norms, eds Rebecca S. Chopp and Sheila Greeve Davaney, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1997, p. 108. 41 Ibid, p. 109. 42 Ibid, p. 107. 43 Ibid, p. 103. 44 Ibid, p. 106. 45 Ibid, p. 109. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid, p. 114. 48 Ibid. 49 Nancy A. Dallavalle, ‘Neither Idolatry nor Iconoclasm: A Critical Essentialism for Catholic Feminist Theology’, Horizons, Vol. 25:1, 1998: 23-42, p. 41. 50 Burrus, ‘Begotten, Not Made’, p. 193. 51 Of course, one would need to ask to what extent this sublimation of desire found expression through outlets such as art, poetry and music. I am not suggesting that creativity and sensuality were entirely banished from Protestant culture, but they were to a very great extent banished from Protestant worship in the Reformed churches, eventually finding expression in the development of Pentecostal and charismatic forms of Protestantism.

Beattie Chapter 6: 17